Chapter 83
Tyler
August, Eight Years Ago
Long Island
Mikey died on a Friday. News traveled quickly. This was in part because he was still a teenager—because his mother was still
sending care packages to his treatment centers, still showing up unannounced, trying to talk sense into a boy who was actually
a man with a disease as real as cancer.
You can’t help but get a tumor. You can’t help but get high. This, at least, was what Arthur would tell me four years later.
It didn’t matter where they found him, how they found him. If I told you, if I set the scene, if I described the motel or
the alley or the bathroom, would it change the way this story played out in your mind?
I am doing you a favor. I am keeping from you the details that haunt my dreams, that turned my rehabilitated, happy little
life into a howling nightmare that played over and over from the minute my mother told me the news until the summer I spent
in Southampton with Katie.
The funeral was on a Tuesday. In the days leading up to the service, Katie had been dropped off at her aunt’s house in New Jersey while her parents were in Pennsylvania.
One of my dad’s friends was my sponsor then, and I spent the weekend on his couch, curled up in a ball, listening to the sound of Katie weeping on the other end of the line, searching for the right words to say.
When she’d finally fall asleep, I’d stare at the ceiling and try to make myself cry.
It didn’t work. It wasn’t that I felt nothing—believe me, I felt everything—but that I didn’t completely believe it to be true.
He was just at another rehab; it was just another overdose.
He always came back. Eventually, he’d get it. Eventually, we’d be close again.
Mikey was the first friend I’d ever known, and for as long as I could remember, what was his was mine. His cubby, his pudding,
his race cars and baseball cards, his tree house, his trundle bed, his extra ticket to the Mets game. At ages four and eight
and twelve and sixteen, even when he started seeing Ingrid, even when he became a star, he never stopped saving space for
me.
When I’d first gotten clean, I was instructed to avoid the people, places, and things that triggered me. In the beginning,
that was school, the docks, the backstreets. But more than anything, it was Mikey. For the first time in our lives, he wanted
nothing to do with me, and to be completely honest, I was terrified of being in the same room as him. After all, he didn’t
want to stop. What if I realized I didn’t want to either? Then what?
There were hundreds of people at the service. Kindergarten teachers and Little League coaches and Sports Illustrated reporters. Aunts and uncles and cousins and classmates and Ingrid and Paul and Carolyn and Katie and Katie and Katie. She
kept turning from the pew, her eyes red and her face warped. Her lips, mouthing, Come here. I need you. Come be with me.
I stared back, unmoving, as she cried ten rows away. As Carolyn howled, arms wrapped around herself. As Paul blotted his eyes and comforted no one. My mom put her shaking hand on my shoulder and gave me a single squeeze. I barely felt it.
Katie kept looking back, that same plea in her eyes. All I could do was finally mouth, Tonight. Tonight, okay? Meet me on the beach.
After the service—and a goodbye I’ll repress until the day I die—I was standing outside the church with my mother, who couldn’t
find her keys. Things were spilling out of her purse: her lipstick, her coupons, a pack of cigarettes, loose change. Her hands
were still shaking, and I was picking stuff off the ground when she craned her neck. Her entire bag fell to the pavement.
Just then, Carolyn stepped between us. She had sunglasses on. Mascara dripped down her face. Her arms were crossed, and her
throat pulsed.
“I told you not to come here, Marcy.”
My mom was still craning her neck. I tried to follow her line of sight, but it was no use. There were people everywhere.
“He lost his best friend. He needed closure. He—”
“Let me ask you something,” Carolyn said. “How come I raise your son, and you get to keep yours? Explain to me how we ended
up here. With my son in a casket and yours going to the Ivy League?”
My mother gulped. Still, she could not stop turning her neck. What was she doing? What was she staring at? I stepped forward,
voice breaking.
“Carolyn,” I said. “I never—”
Her frown hardened. Carolyn, who washed my Little League uniforms. Carolyn, who made me lasagna on my birthday. Carolyn, who
charted my height alongside her children’s on her kitchen wall.
“You need to stay away from my daughter,” she said.
“I—”
“You think I don’t know you’ve been sleeping in her bed? That you’re up there all night, doing what your father did to half
the girls in this town? What you’ve done to half the girls in this town? How many children are you going to take from me?
How many—”
“No,” I said. Sweat was gathering on my forehead and the nape of my neck. This suit, hot and itchy and all wrong. She didn’t
understand. She didn’t understand. “I really care about Katie. She means the world to me. She . . . I—”
“You what? You love her? You’re a murderer, Tyler. You took everything from us. You’re a bad person. You’re just like your father. You—”
“I’m not! I loved Mikey! I . . .”
My mother hadn’t said a word. She was still craning her neck, still staring. What could possibly be so important she couldn’t
step in here? Couldn’t stick up for me? Couldn’t promise that I’d changed?
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” Carolyn said. “You’re going to leave—now. You’re going to go wherever the hell your father
is, or off to your fancy university, or wherever else you can think of, and you’re not going to see, write, or speak to my
daughter ever again. Do you understand?”
“I can’t do that. It’ll crush her. She’s all alone. She—”
“If you’re truly sorry,” she said, “you’ll stay the hell away from my kid.”
“Let me at least talk to her. Let me write her a note, or . . . It’ll break her heart. I can’t—”
“Good,” Carolyn said. “It’s the only way she’ll see you for what you really are. It’s the only way she’ll ever let you go. It’s the . . .”
The crowd had thinned.
My mother was staring at a woman. Tall, slender, shiny.
Dark sunglasses, black dress.
Trembling hands—and blond hair.